


Easier Said Than Done

by LadyOfTheOldWorld



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Background Relationships, Blood, Brief Gore, Cutting, Depression, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Gen, Implied Relationships, M/M, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-01-31 00:56:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12664995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyOfTheOldWorld/pseuds/LadyOfTheOldWorld
Summary: He was alone, save for the voices in his head, and they were unkind at the best of times.





	1. Voices

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hamliet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hamliet/gifts).



> Make note of the tags, and keep yourselves safe. This is shorter than my usual, but it's also more personal than my usual. In short, this is a memory that I have very clearly from a time in my life where I was in this situation. Unlike Juuzou, however, I was truly just as alone I as I felt. If you feel the need to criticize, please just... don't.
> 
> As always, this is dedicated to my wonderful and amazingly supportive friend, Hamliet.

He sucked in a breath, chest feeling as if it were constricting and as if it were about to burst all at once. Depression slammed into him, knocking the air from his lungs, sudden and unrelenting and merciless. Nausea rolled through him like the tide, sometimes more and sometimes less, but never gone. Something - everything - was wrong, and he didn't know what would fix it. Blackness swam around the edges of his vision, threatening to drown him. Boney, cold fingers gripped at boney, cold arms. Stick-thin legs tucked against a hollow abdomen, protruding ribs, and a skeletal chest. Paper-white skin exposed veins, shivers making teeth chatter with the sound of bones clattering together. Wide eyes stared unseeingly, irises and stitches and ragged nails the only color, standing out like blood on snow. Stark cheekbones jutted above sunken cheeks, a knife-sharp jaw resting on an equally prominent knee.

Unkempt white hair tumbled down around tiny shoulders, blending in with the walls, the ceiling, the floor. He was alone in the empty room, but never without the voices in his head. Sometimes they shouted, and sometimes they whispered. Sometimes there were few, and sometimes there were many. At the best of times, they were unkind, while at the worst of times, they were vicious. But they were always there, bouncing off the inside of his head, an always reverberating cacophony of every reason that had ever been spat at him why he shouldn't exist - didn't deserve to exist. The constant noise made him want to tear out his hair, rip open his skin, shatter his skull to just get them out, make them be quiet. His blank eyes stared sightlessly at the door, unaware of the gazes that watched from the window. Had he had a moment of clarity, even just a single breath of release from the things that crushed him from the inside out, he would have known who stood at the door. His father, his lover, his friends. But he was trapped, and only he could drag himself out of the ocean that was threatening to drown him.

However, that was all much easier said, than it was done.


	2. Mirrors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, I continue something first conceived as a one-shot. This one has my memories in it, too, but with more changed/added to fit Juuzou. Heed the tags, and keep yourselves safe, lovelies.

Blood splattered the floor, Scorpion's blade gleaming red. Juuzou shuddered, light-headedness making him tremble. It wasn't just the blood loss; it was never just the blood loss. Hunger assaulted him, even if he couldn't feel the ache of it, making his vision blur at the edges and the world swim. Scars littered his body, but only someone who knew him well -- or Hanbee, for obvious reasons -- would have had any idea what had come from an external source, and what had come from his own hand, his own knife. Or perhaps even Hanbee wouldn't know, as he had always been respectful of Juuzou's distaste for and discomfort with sex, and he did his best not to look too closely whenever the smaller Ghoul Investigator instigated anything more intimate than kissing. Aside from the one he had given his heart to, the only one who would have possibly known the difference would have been his "father," Shinohara. The older Special Class Investigator had proved time and time again that he knew Juuzou even better than his son's lover knew him, but that wasn't surprising, as he had been by the troubled youth's side since they had first met during the raid of Big Madam's estate so long ago. (The time he had spent in a comatose state notwithstanding, of course.)

Shaking his head to clear it of his disjointed and fractured thoughts proved to be a bad idea, as it sent him reeling. The room tipped around him, as the floor tried to rush up to meet him. Collapsing against the counter with what echoed like a crash but couldn't have been, red eyes met their counterpart in the mirror above the sink. Blood dripped onto the tile, yet more smears of crimson joining the growing number of small puddles. Time ticked away, but even now, he was heedless. He was alone, unwise as that may have seemed, but that had more to do with the fact that he lived alone in a tiny, sorry excuse for a studio apartment than anything else. After all, no-one knew, no-one so much as suspected -- there went his fractured logic, again -- so it wasn't like there was a danger of anyone coming to discover him. No, he was playing hooky as always, and as there were about a dozen other places he was fond of to exhaust, it would be at least an hour before anyone even realized where he was, even if his father and lover and squad split up to look, which they wouldn't. He had time, time to make himself look just as ugly as he felt. Time to remind himself of everything he had ever fucked over and up for the people he cared about.

For starters, his very existence brought grief to those he considered family. A cut along his hipbone. For another thing, he was a horrible friend. A cut across from the previous, far too close to his femoral artery for anyone's comfort but his own. His inability to think for himself (weak, pliable, easily manipulated) had nearly allowed Furuta's plan to make Kaneki a dragon to succeed. A deeper cut this time, slicing up his right side. That same stupidity had almost gotten all of Tokyo destroyed. A series of cuts between his starkly protruding left ribs. Worst of all, he was the reason his father had almost died, had been in a coma for almost four years, had been away from his wife and children for far too long. A final cut, one starting at his jutting left collarbone and dragging all the way down to his floating ribs. A cut that left him gasping from the force. A cut so deep that it didn't even start to bleed for a few moments after Scorpion left his skin. When the blood did start to flow, however, it wasn't simply a stream like the others. A veritable river of blood was pouring from his chest, and Juuzou found himself so mesmerized, he didn't even register that he wasn't alone until the ajar bathroom door swung open.

Amid the puddles and pools of blood, a scale sat on the tile floor, numbers frozen where Juuzou had stripped to measure his faults and sins and insanity. The scale blinked 36kg of failure, worthlessness, and sin up at the white ceiling. What should have been 35, 30, 15, 0 had been what let Scorpion slip into his hand, what had drawn blood from his veins and ripped open his skin. All the wrongs that he had committed. But neither Hanbee nor Shinohara saw any of that. They saw numbers that shouldn't have belonged to a living person. They saw none of the filth, none of the rot that he saw under his skin and in his veins, making up his very being. They saw an angel with broken wings, screaming about how worthless he was, unwilling to see or understand that he was loved because of everything he had lived through, was loved in spite of everything he had done and his flaws. They saw bones and scars and pain, where he saw everything that was wrong and needed to be fixed. They saw someone beautiful and broken, but capable of healing and changing and growing. He saw someone who deserved nothing less than to be dead.

His loved ones' screams shattered the mirror, and then everything went black.


End file.
